THE IDEAL EMPLOYEE,Sonal Srivastava

Sonal Srivastava wonders if reactive behaviour is a good idea if an employee feels he hasn't got his worth after putting in his best efforts:

When appraisal forms change hands once a year, your employer wants you to assess yourself and see how you have performed. Have you met your targets? Have you brought anything new to the table? Different companies have varied measures to assess their employees’ performance, and almost all of them now have a rigorous annual appraisal exercise. Key result areas or KRAs form the backbone of assessment, these are mostly used to define an employee’s field of action and whether he has been honestly able to deliver what was expected of him. Or is what he fills out laboriously in those endless columns, self-delusionary fiction?

Another set of skills, loosely termed as business behaviours, come in handy when you work in a team or are interacting with clients on a regular basis. Such is the importance of soft skills that John D Rockefeller reportedly said, “ I will pay more for the ability to deal with people than any other skill under the sun.” So, getting that elusive promotion or raise might not be all that simple. There is much that needs to be accounted for than just your skills on the job. If you managed to do it all, then great, but what do you do when you don’t get what you think you deserve?

Business Behaviors

Besides your core competency such as accounting or software engineering, you must also adopt behaviours that are conducive to the growth of the company, for, the organization is the macrocosm that reflects the aspirations of all those who make it work. You might be concentrating on pursuit of your individual goals but if they don’t match organization aspirations, you stand to lose. By defining ideal professional conduct, organizational  macrocosms create the space for individual ambition.

Positive Attitude

To practice perfect comportment conducive to the growth of the organization as well as the individual, an employee first needs to adopt a positive attitude. This includes spending office hours productively and at times going beyond the call of duty to meet stretch targets that generate profits as well as goodwill. That’s not all, you have to be friendly with your coworkers  and it’s always best to sort our differences if any, by talking about them as soon as they come up, instead of letting them simmer on the backburner.

Be Professional

Tash Hughes, a business communication professional says, “It doesn’t matter if you work for yourself or a boss; there are expectations that you will be professional in the course of business.” Professional behavior, according to Hughes, means punctuality, acceptance of constructive criticism and honesty in dealings and good manners. Let’s add to this list the need to respect deadlines: For what good is a piece of work if it is not delivered on time?

Office Etiquette

Your deportment and general behavior at the workplace and the manner in which you interact with colleagues don’t go unnoticed—even if these are not part of the form-filling exercise. Human resource managers and the person you report to are meant to keep a tab on your overall behavior at work and whether you use office time constructively.

However, what happens when despite putting your best foot forward, you don’t get the place in your organization that you think you deserve? For instance, you just may not get that promotion that you have been patiently waiting for, even after slogging for years.

Should we stop being good, if we are not rewarded appropriately? “That’s when you need to ask what is the purpose of good behavior”, says Anant Nadkarni, an expert on sustainable business practices. He explains that life is universal and it is present for its own sake. Similarly, good behavior is also there for its own sake. You don’t suddenly change your behavior if somebody behaves badly with you; you are what you are and you ought to carry on with your life without being affected by your circumstances. So, just be what you are whether you get that promotion or not.

“Ego is the individual platform that makes you feel suppressed,” says Nadkarni, adding that the best way to deal with that low feeling on receiving your appraisal letter is surrendering totally to the universal Self and being true to your individual self. “Just as there is a universal Self and an individual self, society and the corporation are linked, too. The company cannot manipulate the system. What will you achieve by not being good? Surgeon Shantanu Nagarkatti cites Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Theory of Flow—“You are in a state of flow when you are completely absorbed in the activity that you are doing—that is, being creatively involved with what you do for a living.” Nagarkatti says once you experience that, you won’t get bored whether you are rewarded for it or not.

Courtesy: The Speaking Tree,TOI,May 5,2013

MENTORING

Vijayalaxmi writes about the concept and the manifold advantages of MENTORING.Read on:

The idea of mentoring is very old, older than Socrates and Plato and prevalent in history, literature, and pop culture”. Socrates called mentoring a "midwife assisting the labor of the mind in giving birth to wisdom and knowledge.” Mentoring gets its name from a Greek word that means enduring and is a prolonged relationship between a youth and an adult. The adult supports, guides, and assists the younger person as he goes through an intricate period, facing new challenges, or works to correct earlier problems (Lytle & Tamara, 2009). The extensive study on mentoring began in the United States. The cause of this sudden interest was the country’s bureau of statistics mentioning that the workforce would decrease by 2% in 2014 due to the retirement of baby boomers along with the fact that the birth rates of the United States was also declining (Tossi, 2005).  This propelled the organizations to explore various methods to hire and retain employees in order to maintain competitive edge. One such strategy that emerged was the implementation of a formal mentoring program.

Mentoring is a form of employee development. It is a long-term relationship where the goals may also include personal development in addition to professional improvement. According to Wong & Premkumar (2007) mentoring is a method of learning wherein personal and reciprocal relationships are built. The stress is on task achievement with an emphasis on emotional support. Mentoring is a process that utilizes workers with more experience to assist the development of workers with less experience (Holliday, 2001). Organizations discovered this method had manifold advantages. It not only benefitted employees, but also helped the workforce to become more communicative. Mentee learnt from practical experience and developed into a better and more productive worker and the mentor took pride in the fact that he was able to pass his legacy of knowledge to the next generation. 

Models of mentoring 

The three most commonly acknowledged models for understanding the process of mentoring are apprentice model, competency model and reflective models.
Apprentice model the mentee learns from observation of the tasks done by the mentor.
The competency model stresses on the systematic feedback given by the mentor to the mentee on performance and progress.
Reflective model- the mentor encourages the mentee to become a reflective practioner. This is considered to be a more insightful and nurturing model of mentoring.

Mentoring has evolved from a dyadic concept to a concept that involves a set or constellation of relationships. Mentoring as a concept of developmental process in organizations was first mentioned in 1977 and has emerged as an important process for student enrichment, for leadership development and for professional progression. The benefits of mentoring for an organization are substantial – both tangible as well as non-tangible for the protégé as well as the organization. Mentoring serves varied purposes in an organization; for new recruits, it is used as an orienting and integration process. For existing employees, it is used as a method of acclimatization and socialization and as a training and development tool for managers and leaders. It helps improve recruitment and induction procedures, improves succession planning, and increases organizational commitment and leadership development.  The positive outcome of mentoring on individuals is reflected in some comparative studies between mentored and non-mentored. These studies show that mentoring has positive effect on career satisfaction, career mobility, and positive job attitudes. Today, the importance of mentorship has increased in most institutional settings. Organizations as well as educational institutions have started to use mentoring as a tool to serve a wide variety of purposes from the career development of students to accelerating career development of young managers. Indeed, mentoring has made significant contribution in the growth and performance of the employee and helped the organization achieve a competitive advantage in a changing and complex environment.


The author can be contacted at vijaya@niilm.com

Profs.Arun Kumar and N.Meenakshi discuss how RISILIENCE can prove to be the best tool to deal with and overcome adversities of life...

An excerpt from the book "Organizational Behavior: A Modern Approach" by Arun kumar and N. Meenakshi,read on:

RESILIENCE

Some people suffer severe tragedies and hardships. Their children die in accidents, they are terminally ill, they get fired, they are divorced. Their lives should have been in disarray, but they go about their lives as if everything is just fine with them. They look forward to what future holds for them. They are resilient people. Lesser mortals face minor tragedies and hardships, and yet get depressed. They dread future. They are fragile people. A person’s education, experience, and training are important, but his level of resilience will determine whether he will fail or succeed.

 Resilience is the skill and the capacity to be robust under conditions of enormous stress and change. It is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world that is deeply entrenched into a person’s mind and soul. Resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness. They make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair. They are constantly improvising to save themselves.

Reality

It is believed that resilience stems from a person’s optimistic nature. It is true but only as long as such optimism does not distort his sense of reality. In extremely adverse situations, an optimistic outlook can result in disaster. Resilient people have very sober and down-to-earth views of those parts of the reality that matter for survival. An optimistic outlook is helpful in getting over a moderately difficult problem, but a cool, almost pessimistic, sense of reality is more important for more daunting challenges.

It is important that the person or the organization understands and accepts the painful reality of the situation because most people and organizations slip into denial mode as a coping mechanism. It is unpleasant and emotionally wrenching to face painful reality, and people avoid facing painful reality for as long as they can. When a person acknowledges the impending hardship, he prepares himself to act in ways that allow him to endure and survive the hardship i.e. he trains himself to survive before he faces the hardship. He prepares himself to use every means to save himself for the next day.

Meaning

When a person goes through hardships and tragedies, he sees himself as a victim. He asks himself as to why he has to go through all this pain. Living through hardship carries no lesson for him. The resilient person makes meaning of the hardships and tragedies he is going through because he possesses a strong value system. His value system enables him to interpret his hardships and tragedies in ways that makes him believe that they are inevitable and they are destined to go through them. Such an interpretation helps him to rise above the sufferings of the moment and look forward to a better future. The meaning helps him to connect to the future.

Companies that survive crisis also have strong value systems which do not change over the years. They find purposes beyond making money. The values shape the company’s decisions during the crisis. The values shape the reactions of the employees to the crisis. The employees live the value of the company during the crisis.

Rituals

The resilient person has the ability to make do with whatever is at hand. He is inventive. He has the ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper tools. He makes the most of whatever he has. He puts objects to unfamiliar uses. In concentration camps, resilient inmates keep pieces of string or wire, believing that they might need them sometime. He always keeps tinkering and tries every possible solutions when ordinary mortals are paralyzed by the gravity of the situation. The resilient person keeps pegging with the hope that one of the things that he is trying will eventually work.

Companies which survive crisis are full of improvisers. The employees do not wait for orders from the top. They do whatever they think will help them to retrieve the situation. These companies and people who survive crisis live on rules and rituals. These companies understand that the employees cannot be creative under stressful situations and they can respond only in their habituated ways. Rules and rituals enable employees to keep doing what they are supposed to do. Employees feel less distracted by the crisis and they sure are inching out of the crisis because the rules and rituals ensure that there is some action taking place to retrieve the situation. Employees who know what they have to do in what situation are not paralyzed when a painful situation strikes them. The rituals guide their actions and keep them moving ahead.

The authors can be contacted on nmeenakshi@niilm.com and akumar@niilm.com